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maemo.org - Talk (https://talk.maemo.org/index.php)
-   Nokia N900 (https://talk.maemo.org/forumdisplay.php?f=44)
-   -   Battery Drains Way Too Fast (No Wifi/Skype/Email on at all) (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=35912)

TheUnlockr.com 2009-12-06 17:35
Re: Battery Drains Way Too Fast (No Wifi/Skype/Email on at all)
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by whealy (Post 412318)
I've got the same battery levels that TheUnlockr.com is describing. The only interesting thing I've read here is that the people that seem to be reporting good battery life don't seem to be using email services. I know I was using Exchange and IMPA (and even tried POP version) accounts when I had the low battery life.

In my last attempt I changed both email's to download via manual initiative only. But the sync icon seemed to continue to show up anyway.

Mine is going back to Nokia for just this reason. I LOVE the OS. But the issues I'm facing make the phone unusable.
Ya I had those issues with email with the first N900 I had (was replaced by Nokia) so this time I never even set up email at all (I just goto Gmail.com to access webmail instead, even though that is a pain in the *** lol). So the email isn't what is doing it to my phone, but eh who knows at this point.

TheUnlockr.com 2009-12-06 17:37
Re: Battery Drains Way Too Fast (No Wifi/Skype/Email on at all)
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by sschueller (Post 412405)
The battery stamina does seem quite bad. I didn't make it through the 1st day.

I did notice that if I had no signal for several hours the battery would die a lot faster.

Also sometimes (rarely) when I connect the phone to the USB port on my Win7 PC it does not enter charging mode. One morning I had a almost dead phone.

My SIM card is 13 years old and says omnipoint on it which became voicestreamn and then t-mobile.
Wow, youve never lost your phone in 13 years, I just want to applaud you for a second lol
Even though this may not solve the problem entirely, you DEFINITELY need a new SIM card. Those 13 year old SIM cards used totally different power consumption not too mention are not optimized for 3G (considering it didnt exist yet really lol).
See if your battery issues are better after getting a new SIM and let us know, maybe youll be lucky and thats all you needed.

TheUnlockr.com 2009-12-06 17:40
Re: Battery Drains Way Too Fast (No Wifi/Skype/Email on at all)
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by chritto (Post 412426)
Have you guys turned off GPS/Location services? My understanding is that the phone polls the GPS occasionally to display your location in your IM status etc - perhaps if it's disabled entirely in settings, your battery life will improve. At least with my iPhone, GPS goes through battery life like there's no tomorrow.
Thanks for the suggestion!
I actually turned mine off soon as I got the phone, not too mention though that this OS is similar to Symbian in how it uses GPS and Wifi. With my old Nokia 5800, you could leave GPS on without an issue because the phone was smart enough to only actually turn it on when an application called for it (like Maps) and that phones battery life was awesome for me (and little sidenote, had the EXACT same battery our N900s do lol).

Anything else guys? Im willing to try whatever, anyone know how to use powertop? Does that help? Tried to bring it up with sudo powertop but it asks for a password...

nokialova 2009-12-06 17:54
Re: Battery Drains Way Too Fast (No Wifi/Skype/Email on at all)
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheUnlockr.com (Post 410931)
Ha ya at least I dont have a Pre lol but still would like to see a fix for this.

The fluctuations in battery life because of power cycles would be nowhere near the kinda fix I need. Your talking max and extra 30 minutes difference, not hours and hours (some people on here say they are using their phone in a similar way and getting 12-20 hours and I get 4-6...

Im thinking it could be coverage in my house, it fluctuates a lot, but still is this something I can fix or should I wait and pray for an OTA?

I have long given up on expecting long battery life-cycles on all these smartphones. I have an iPhone 3GS (anathema to mention that on a maemo forum, I know), but the battery life is even worse than my N900. I do have a great feeling about everything N900 though, as the best is yet to come. I bought mine 2 days ago in the Nokia Store in London and spent some time in the Maemo Lounge. I also bought my Nokia mobile charger and that goes everywhere with me now.

j.s 2009-12-07 01:29
Re: Battery Drains Way Too Fast (No Wifi/Skype/Email on at all)
 
I've written a short perl script to monitor battery drain. It will also monitor charging, but not many battery items get updated during charging. The script logs the battery parameters once per minute on the minute. Ten minutes might be better. The stepsize available from the system is
pretty coarse, so it is only good for extended perioids of stable average power draw. (e.g. wifi on for an hour, all radios off for an hour, etc.)

If you name the script batt_mon.pl and want to log to 20091207bat.log, then type in a terminal window:
Code:
perl -w batt_mon.pl > 20091207bat.log
The columns are
time in seconds since 1970 Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC
battery level, seems to go frem 0 to 9
battery % full, state is still 'ok' at 10%
remaining battery power in seconds (little reality)
milliampere-hours remaining
present battery millivolts
battery state, 'full', 'ok', others I don't know yet
charging/discharging

Everything between {} below is supposed to be indented. If not, it is really part of the line above. when I paste from the preview of this post into the vi editor, the lines are as they should be.

Code:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
print "#  time\tlevel\t%chrg\tsec\tmah\tmVolts\tstate\tchg/dis\n";
while(1) {
  $now = time;
  @lines = `lshal | grep batt`;
  @level = split ' ', $lines[1];
  @pct = split ' ', $lines[4];
  @remtime =  split ' ', $lines[10];
  @mah =  split ' ', $lines[12];
  @mv = split ' ', $lines[17];
  @st = split ' ', $lines[0];
  @chrg = split ' ', $lines[8];
  @disc = split ' ', $lines[9];
  $cd = substr($chrg[2],0,1) . "/" . substr($disc[2],0,1);
  print "$now\t$level[2]\t$pct[2]\t$remtime[2]\t$mah[2]\t$mv[2]\t$st[2]\t$cd\n";
  sleep 60 - time%60;
}

mrdelgibbons 2009-12-07 01:36
Re: Battery Drains Way Too Fast (No Wifi/Skype/Email on at all)
 
To be fair, all of my previous phones have always started to drain pretty bad when constantly searching for network coverage in a crappy coverage area. I think that is just the way of the technology...

big_zippy 2009-12-07 13:06
Re: Battery Drains Way Too Fast (No Wifi/Skype/Email on at all)
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by j.s (Post 413740)
I've written a short perl script to monitor battery drain...
I don't know whether to laugh or cry over this! I got my N900 last week and I think it is a brilliant piece of technology. The fact that you can write perl scripts to monitor the battery life is brilliant. The fact that such script, when run, will substantially eat into the already ridiculous battery life is a travesty.

The N900 is a Nokia device which has cellular technology built in. As such, Joe public (even the Linux nerdy ones) will expect this to encompass all Nokia knows about mobile phone technology. In my view this would imply that the phone would last at least a day on a single charge. It is sold as lasting 2-4 days (yes, read the pre-release garb and listen to the guys in the Nokia store).

I have stripped my phone down - no e-mail update, GSM only (no 3G), 10 second backlight, no widgets (none added, maybe I should remove the calendar too), no background applications running. It still only lasts about 4-5 hours!!!! (after 15+ charge cycles). This is just not acceptable, and almost certainly makes it "not fit for purpose".

I'm hoping that something can be done soon in a firmware update. If they had been straight and said 5 hours battery life I would have walked away. Instead I've been teased with brilliant technology but can't use it, unless I carry a phone charger/USB lead around with me all day and stay near a power point/desktop computer! Well hey, I don't want to make phone calls with a USB lead in my ear.

Rant over

BZ

adrianp 2009-12-07 19:46
Re: Battery Drains Way Too Fast (No Wifi/Skype/Email on at all)
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by big_zippy (Post 414450)
I don't know whether to laugh or cry over this! I got my N900 last week and I think it is a brilliant piece of technology. The fact that you can write perl scripts to monitor the battery life is brilliant. The fact that such script, when run, will substantially eat into the already ridiculous battery life is a travesty.
BZ
Why do think this script will "substantially eat" the battery life ? Once started it runs 2 commands does a small amount of processing and appends to a file, then sleeps for almost 60 seconds. Typical bread and butter Unix.

Personally I think people should calm down, if they don't like the N900 return it and buy something else, or wait and see what occurs and find work-arounds for their issues until fixes appear.

danielwilson 2009-12-07 20:42
Re: Battery Drains Way Too Fast (No Wifi/Skype/Email on at all)
 
does wifi drain battrery even if you not using it but its connected

depu 2009-12-07 20:52
Re: Battery Drains Way Too Fast (No Wifi/Skype/Email on at all)
 
@danielwilson
yes it does


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